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Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Panic switch

I have been royally slacking on jiu-jitsu this summer. I'm going to try not to overanalyze that - it's just the way the last few weeks have been and I plan on being more consistent as summer wraps up and I get back to school.

Tonight's class was interesting. There's a tournament coming up (the same one I had planned on competing in until I bought a house and hit a brick wall of stress) so for tonight's class we reviewed the rules and basic strategy of competition BJJ before sparring from standing.

I thought I was coping just fine with this until I was almost through my third "match". My partner finally managed to get a full 3 seconds worth of mount on me. Not a big deal. Until my mind blew everything out of proportion and I panicked.

It was like something snapped inside my mind and I just wanted to curl up in a ball and cry. Forget jiu-jitsu, I could barely breathe. It was all panic over losing too, my partner wasn't even being heavy on me or anything. Some thought weaseled into my brain about how I just lost 4 more points and there was no way I could come back from that and all my issues with competing came flooding into my head. Ow.

I kept it together long enough to finish the class but damn. I guess I have an ego problem. I'm definitely overly concerned with these points whenever we talk about BJJ in terms of points. I also have a serious confidence problem. I have no faith whatsoever in my ability to use BJJ to help me out in a competition setting. I probably don't have a lot of confidence in regular sparring either but it doesn't ambush me the same way.

And it is definitely the ambushing the screws with my mind. So much ow. I'm off to take some advil and get sleep. Hopefully Thursday's class is better.

1 comment:

Don't be so hard on yourself. You are doing something so outside your comfort zone that unexpected emotions will surface and usually at the weirdest times. You are also not comfortable with doing something that you are graded at and not excelling at it. Try not to be so hard on yourself and you do BJJ to have fun and when the points play into it, the fun turns to work and it doesn't seem like so much fun anymore. Stop counting the points in your head and let someone else do it. Do not even think about it, just have fun!!!